Counterfeiting of consumer and commercial goods is a significant problem. It has previously been proposed to discourage counterfeiting by securing indicia of authenticity to articles of merchandise. Proposals in accordance with the prior art have included an optically-scannable security label which has parallel lenticules of a pre-determined spatial frequency, as described in U.S. Pat. No. 4,433,437, issued to Fantone.
According to another proposal, electronic article surveillance (EAS) components may be integrated or embedded in an article of merchandise, and may be detected to verify the authenticity of the article of merchandise, as disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 5,499,015, issued to Winkler et al. and commonly assigned with the present application.
The prior art has not recognized that conventional enclosures for magnetomechanical EAS markers present opportunities for concealing, and therefore increasing the effectiveness of, product authentication elements.